Connections

Last week, I read Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell which is an entertaining and thought provoking effort that purports to analyze who, how and why success is achieved. It best works as a reminder that achievements are not always the result of overwhelming merit, but rather a mixture of talent with healthy doses of luck and circumstance. For example, the correlation of professional hockey players in Canada to early year birthdates (the Canadian hockey school league cut-off date is January 1 and Gladwell’s thesis is that older kids are bigger/more mature and thus receive disproportionate benefits such as better opportunities to play and additional coaching), although not a huge revelation to parents of elementary school age children, is eye-opening as to the extent of the “birthday” effect on youth athletic league opportunities. As the book progresses, however, the insights and conclusions become more attenuated. I remain unconvinced that China’s rice-based economy fully explains the sweep of Chinese culture from ancient times to today. There are many times where I thought the book fell into the logical trap of ex post facto, ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this). Books like Outliers, and Freakonomics by Steven Levitt fall into the recent wave of pop sociology/economics books, and are entertaining to read, but may do no better matching correlations to causation than the rest of us. We know that correlation does not necessarily mean causation, but I would offer that causation does not necessarily mean correlation. By that I mean that many events are the result of a convergence of happenings and non-happenings that are very hard to discern and often unique. This is not to say that the effort to find underlying causes is not worth undertaking. Many of the advances of civilization have come from recognizing and exploiting patterns of causation. It’s just that the connections we find may not be the ones we expect.

All I'm saying is simply this, that all life is interrelated, that somehow we're caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. You can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality. –Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

When to Call Your Lawyer

I had the opportunity to present some training sessions on "Working with the Law Department" to some of our sales teams last week. A frequent question was when to involve the Law Department in deals. I would recommend bringing the lawyers in as early as possible, in fact, even before they are needed. What I like to do is to contact the counterparty's counsel prior to documents being exchanged, just to explain the deal and to explain our approach to our business. There is an uncanny correlation between the occurrence of these calls and quicker negotiations.

As I have mentioned in an earlier post, contract negotiations are all about trust- if you build the trust before negotiations start in earnest, the contract negotiation cycle will be shortened. Plus, the other party will often avoid taking a "by the book" approach to document drafting when they understand the context of the deal better.

As I said to the group, "If you do a little bit of law, I'll do a little bit of sales..."

Our Digital World- Email

As we start the New Year, I have developed a couple of work-related resolutions. The first is the continuation of a long-standing resolution to focus on the truly important tasks and not be fooled by urgent or semi-urgent items that masquerade as important. By important, I mean meaningful tasks of lasting value.

The truth is that no matter how long you work or how hard you try, some things will be left undone. Make sure that your undone list has as few important items and as many unimportant items as possible. We focus on our to-do lists, but this year, I plan to focus as much on my not-to-do list.

This year, I also plan to continue my long-standing assault on email. Statistics I’ve read estimate the number of emails sent per day (in 2009) to be around 247 billion. Even granting that 80% of this traffic is spam, that’s an astounding number.

Of course, email can be a great tool, but emails are not always the best medium for dealing with complicated questions. To me, the telephone is much better for providing a richer dialogue and usually a quicker result.

Moreover, as a lawyer, I have seen how emails can compromise the security of an organization, create a bad record and lead to unfortunate misunderstandings. This doesn’t even take into account the many emails that require reading through long email chains to figure out what is going on. I feel like an archaeologist digging through layers of soil to reach the meaning of some emails; and sometimes like the movie Memento, emails are presented in some convoluted backward chronology.

So I offer five starter rules for using email, don’t use emails to air controversies, don’t write what you wouldn’t say to someone’s face, be descriptive in the subject line, keep your writing appropriately short (even terse) and use caution in replying to all.

May all your 2011 resolutions be successful.